While Microsoft has long been a key provider for financial services companies, it has only recently shifted its strategy to take more of a leadership role in that community.

“We have come to understand how important our enterprise customer is to us,” says financial services GM Tracy Issel. “We are moving from being a provider in this industry to being a true partner to being a real player, helping to define the future of the financial services industry.”

Microsoft’s Insurance Value Chain has evolved since it was launched almost seven years ago as an integration concept and prescriptive guidance for integration techniques and product usage using Microsoft technology. It has assembled a vast network of Microsoft partners and has been leveraging new technology to simplify integration between partner and in-house solutions.

With the completion of the acquisition of Parlano, producer of the MindAlign persistent group chat service, in early October, Microsoft’s Unified Communications Strategy has taken another leap forward.

“Until now, all we’ve had is a person-centric view,” says Shaun Pierce, general manager, Server Products, Unified Communications Group, Microsoft. “We already have instant messaging and a form of group chat, but they [Parlano] provide a completely different lens on the way to communicate, which instead of being person-to-person is topic-based.”

Microsoft Startup Center Teams with Bank of America, MasterCard and FedEx

Startups generally need funding, and Microsoft’s Startup Center added tools to help entrepreneurs access and manage funds this summer when it announced partnerships with Bank of America Corp., MasterCard Worldwide and FedEx Corporate Services for financial management, payroll and shipping solutions.

Startup Center, which launched in March as an extension of Microsoft’s Small Business Center, focuses on the more than 1 million businesses that startup in the US each year, according to Microsoft estimates.

Microsoft and Novell may not be natural partners, but some financial firms are already cheering their new pact.

Given the number of mergers and acquisitions in the financial services industry, most institutions have a heterogeneous infrastructure environment, complete with more than one operating system. If only the systems vendors collaborated to increase interoperability, that complexity and risk could be reduced. In November 2006, Microsoft and Novell forged a pact that just might make that dream a reality.

Some big name financial firms reacted quickly to the news. AIG, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse have already announced their intent to take advantage of the benefits of the interoperability agreement between Microsoft and Novell. Under three separate customer agreements, Microsoft will deliver to each company SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise subscription certificates, allowing these customers to take advantage of the Microsoft and Novell agreement.

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer came to New York in mid-March with Microsoft’s new “People-Ready” marketing campaign, he was making a case for the importance of people to a company’s success, and the importance of software in making people productive.